Author: veritywilde

Journalist, armchair sports fan, book worm and show fiend. There's a sentence you don't hear too often.
books, bookshops

Books in the Wild: Daunt Marylebone

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One of the reasons I love wandering over Daunt Books in Marylebone is because the building is pretty and I like to see what they’re highlighting in their windows – because it’s usually totally different to the other book shops in central London. So imagine my delight this week when they actually changed one of the window displays while I was browsing in the shop!

This was the one they swapped out – you can actually se there are already a couple of empty blocks in the picture – which is for a shiny new edition of a 1950s novel that I had never heard of, but that sounds really interesting. Green Water, Green Sky is about a divorcee and her daughter who lead an itinerant existence in the sort of European spots that rich people liked to hang out in, and what happens when the daughter tries to break free of her mother.

And this is what it was replaced with – The Damascus Events – which is about the 1860 massacre in Damascus, which I’m going to admit that I’d also never heard of, but which was significant in the change from the old Ottoman order towards the modern Middle East.

On the other side we have Family and Borghesia – which is two novellas about domestic life, isolation and the passing of time, which I’m sure are excellent but really don’t sound like a me thing!

The little window was Back to the Local which is a new edition of a book from 1949 about the pubs of London, which seems just perfect for the location!

Then the multi-book window just has all sorts of things – including several from my list of things I’d like to buy when the pile gets to a sensible state – like Once Upon a Time World about the French Riviera, Erotic Vagrancy, the latest in the stream of books about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the sequel to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, and Abroad in Japan.

The crime tower and table has quite a lot of stuff that I’ve read 0 but also enough stuff that I’ve still got on the pile to make me feel guilty enough not to buy any books! So along with the stuff I’ve read like the Richard Osman and Rev Richard Coles (who Him Indoors had not realised were not all Richard Osman), Eight Detectives and The Cracked Mirror which I’m reading at the moment, there’s also The Strangers Companion, Helle and Death and The Mystery Guest which are all sitting on the Kindle…

This side of the crime display was much less guilt inducing – just the Tom Hindle Murder On Lake Garda that’s sitting on the pile, and then the third Cesare Aldo and the Grave Expectations sequel that I want to read, but that I can resist until they come out in paperback!

And finally, a new hardback fiction display – featuring Welcome to Glorious Tuga which I’ve read, and The Divorcées which is on the actual pile because I haven’t and Background for Love and Anita De Monte Laughs Last which sounds like I might really like them, if I can just get the pile under control some time…

Have a great weekend!

cozy crime, detective, Series I love

Series I Love: Maine Clambake mysteries

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I wrote about this series briefly back in 2022 as a bingeable series, but we’re two years on now and I’ve read eleven of the twelve in the series and I want to upgrade it to a series I love!

Our heroine is Julia Snowden, who grew up in the small Maine town of Busman’s Harbor then moved away for college and to work in finance and then returned at the start of the series to help her family’s struggling business. That’s the clambake of the series title, which is on an island a short boat ride from the town, which her family has owned for several generations. The first mystery is set on the island, but there’s enough building out of the world that there are plenty of options for murder locations (and victims) so that Julia’s business doesn’t start to seem cursed and you wonder how they are staying in business!

One of the things that I particularly like about the series is that it shows the seasonal life of the town – with the frantically busy summer season as the locals try to make the maximum possible from the influx of tourists and then the quieter winter months where many people have to find other sources of income to sustain them until the weather improves again. It also touches on issues like gentrification and modernisation and the impact of the loss of traditional industries on coastal towns like Busman’s Harbor.

Beyond Julia there is a large cast of regulars, including her mother, her sister and her sister’s family, but also others that I don’t want to mention because it’s going to be spoilery. Suffice it to say that Julia builds out a nice life for herself in the town and that Barbara Ross resists the urge to marry her off quickly to an obvious love interest. And we know how much I like that in a cozy series – see also Meg Langslow and Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery and Library Lovers series.

Now eleven of the twelve have recently* dropped into Kindle Unlimited which makes it a great time to have a good old binge on them. The twelfth only came out in April, and there’s no announcement yet for a thirteen so we probably have about nine months at least to wait for another installment.

Have a great weekend everyone

*I mean recently enough that I’ve only just noticed despite having the ones I hadn’t read on more than one of my Amazon wishlists.

Book previews

Out this week: New Cathy Yardley

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Role Playing was one of my favourite books of last summer, so I’m really looking forward to reading Cathy Yardley’s new book, which came out on Tuesday. Do Me a Favour’s blurb also sounds like absolutely my cup of tea. The heroine is Willa, a cookbook writer who has moved from California to the Pacific North West for a new start after the death of her husband. The hero is her new neighbour, Hudson, a handyman who lives on a farm with his parents and adult children. I am absolutely here for romances with older heroes and heroines with a bit of life experience, and I’m hoping that despite bereavement in the backstory this isn’t going to be too heavy or angsty.

I pre-ordered this one – because it helps authors – but it’s in Kindle Unlimited from the get go, so there’s no Kobo link for you, and it looks like the paperback is from an Amazon imprint too, so it may not be in the shops either.

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Sports romances

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The Olympics Opening Ceremony takes place in Paris on Friday, but actually the first bits of action happen today with the start of the football and rugby 7s pool games, so for this Recommendsday I’m reminding you of some of the sports romances that I’ve enjoyed – although full disclaimer, a lot of these sports aren’t in the olympics.

The men’s 100m at the weekend

But I’m going to start with one that is – football of the soccer variety and recent BotW pick When Grumpy met Sunshine which has a bad boy of football in a fake relationship with his ghost writer. There’s also Chloe Liese’s Bergman Brothers series, which has a couple of soccer stars among the heroes and heroines – like in If Only You, which has the double whammy of a soccer-playing heroine and an ice hockey player hero.

In fact ice hockey romances seem to have overtaken NFL players as the sport you’re most likely to see in a romance novel, possibly because the word puck rhymes so usefully for a title. Before the ice hockey romance craze, most of the sports romances were about NFL players, like Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars series or Alexa Martin’s Playbook series. And now we’ve got a growing group of baseball romances too, so I can only assume that we’re a year max away from a load of basketball player romances.

I have read more baseball romances than other sports recently – but that’s not saying much because it’s basically just Cat Sebastian’s two historical ones – You Should Be So Lucky and We Could Be So Good. It’s not quite a straight romance-romance, but Linda Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over remains among my favourite novels of recent years.

I often find it quite tricky to recommend some of the more recently published sports romances, because everything is tending very New Adult and that is not my bag at all. I’ve read at least two NFL romances in the last six months where the blurb has seemed like it was right up my street and then in the reading I’ve wanted to throw them across the room* because they’ve annoyed me so much. And no I’m not going to tell you who that is, but I’m sure you can work it out if you look through my Goodreads reviews!

In terms of my own to-read pile, I’ve got Let The Games Begin which is actually set at an Olympics, Match Point which is tennis, Tessa Bailey’s Fan Girl Down which is about golf and Cross the Line which is about Formula One on my to-read pile.

Happy Wednesday everyone

*but I didn’t because they were ebooks and I might have damaged my Kindle if it hit something.

Book of the Week, books, mystery

Book of the Week: The Theft of the Iron Dogs

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As I said yesterday, a busy week in life and also a fairly busy week in reading. And I’m back with a British Library Crime classic pick today, because this is really good – and also has a beautiful cover.

It’s just after the war and Inspector MacDonald is hunting for a coupon racketeer who has gone missing in London, reported missing by his fiancée. In Lancashire Giles Hoggett, a book dealer turned cow farmer, has found something strange and potentially sinister in his fishing cottage. His wife is sceptical but he writes to a Scotland Yard detective who solved another case locally not that long before. Soon MacDonald is visiting for the weekend and it seems that his coupon case may be connected to the missing items at the cottage.

I really like E C R Lorac. Almost every time I read one her books it’s up there for Book of the Week – and it was a surprise to me that it’s been a year since I picked one. She is so good at writing about Lancashire and the communities there, and this really evokes the tight-knit community in the countryside as well as the immediate aftermath of the war. As the granddaughter of farming families (on both sides!) I really love the way she writes about people who know their land, the rhythms of the seasons and that you have to respect nature. Oh and the mystery is pretty good too!

The Theft of the Iron Dogs is available as a paperback in the British Library Crime Classics range and it is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it’s not on Kobo right now, but as I’ve said before the BLCC titles rotate in and out of that still be back on Kobo at some point.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: July 15 – July 21

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A really busy week again – busy at work and busy out of work. And it seems like the sun has appeared – how long it stays for and whether this is the entirety of summer remains to be seen! And this week is another busy one. I’ve got at least one night at the theatre – and have you seen the news agenda?!

Read:

The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

Muddled Through by Barbara Ross

Hidden Beneath by Barbara Ross

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

Notorious in New Hampshire by Patti Benning

The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Games*

The Theft of the Iron Dogs by E C R Lorac

Started:

Noise Floor by Andrew Cartmel

Still reading:

The Hazelbourne Ladies’ Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson*

The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmire*

One pre-order dropped onto my Kindle – the new K J Charles, which I have been very good and haven’t started yet!

Bonus picture: Saturday back at the Olympic stadium for the Diamond League. My first time back since watching Mo Farah win at the Worlds in 2017, and I can’t believe it’s 12 years since we were here for the Olympics!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: America’s Sweethearts

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Back to the streaming services this Sunday and a documentary that I actually watched basically as soon as it came out – but which has taken a few weeks to actually get posted because of things that were slightly more pressing on a time front. But actually it’s been really interesting to watch the conversations about this series over the last few weeks as well.

America’s Sweethearts is a seven part documentary series about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It follows them across the course of one season – with auditions to join the team, the training camp that follows and then the actual football season. It picks out a couple of the women in particular to highlight – Victoria and to a lesser degree Madeleine, veterans whose mothers were also on the squad; Caroline, newly retired and trying to adjust to the post-DCC world and her sister Anna-Kate who is auditioning for the team herself this year; Kelcey, a senior veteran on the team in her final season and Reese, a rookie candidate looking to make the team for the first time. Using those women it explores the impact of being on the team – physically and mentally, the sisterhood of the women who have been a part of it, and the squad’s place in the multi-billion dollar brand that is the Dallas Cowboys.

This is not the first series about the team – there were previously 14 seasons of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team produced by the CMT channel. Both series were authorised by the organisation itself, the people running the team are the same – DCC director Kelli Finglass, chief choreographer Judy Trammell – both former DCC themselves – and their boss Charlotte Jones Anderson, daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Even some of the cheerleaders on the squad are the same – the CMT show finished with the 2021 season and some of those women were still cheering last seaons – but the actual shows are very different.

Making the Team was very much a reality tv series in many ways – each season followed a similar structure: you started with the preliminary auditions and semi finals, it moved on to finals weekend where the re-auditioning veterans join the new hopefuls, then you move to training camp where across the next episodes the girls will learn the “signature dance” complete with kickline ending in the infamous jump splits, get make overs, be fitted for their uniforms, have their publicity photos taken and watch the rookie hopefuls get cut one by one to make a team of around 36. Some years you’ll also get to see auditions for the team’s show group – who get to do extra dance performances beyond the football games – or watch the veterans trip to a holiday resort to shoot the squad’s swimsuit calendar. The main focus of the show is on the fresh rookies – some will be completely new, others might be returners who were cut in previous years – and get a few glimpses of the cheerleaders you’ve followed in recent seasons.

And as you’ve probably guessed by comparing my descriptions of the two shows, they are quite different beasts. And not just because Netflix has paid for the music rights so you can finally be told that the “Signature dance” is actually known as Thunderstruck – because that’s the song that it is danced to*. The team behind America’s Sweethearts are using the structure of the season as a way of examining the idea of the squad as a whole.

And the appeal of the series goes way beyond the viewers of the old CMT series (something which the series’s subreddit is yet to come to terms with). What do I mean by that? well Him Indoors hated MTT with a burning passion – my sister and I watched it when he was out of the room – but he said he wanted to take a look at this series and see what it was like – and ended up watching the whole thing. A colleague at work who is a sports and documentary fan but not someone I would have expected to have watched it, had already watched it when I went to recommend it to him and described it as the best documentary series he’s watched this year.

And there are a lot of different things it is possible to take from watching it – hence why it’s spawed a thousand think pieces for you to read on the subject. There’s Vanity Fair’s The Agony and Ecstasy of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Show, Vox’s The ugly process of turning beautiful women into Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, The Guardian’s Do you struggle to accept rejection? We could all learn a lot from American Cheerleaders, USA Today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Netflix show is addictive. Here’s why, The Globe and Mail’s The secret feminism of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and BBC News’s more simple America’s Sweethearts: Life after Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. And that’s just a small selection.

I could write paragraphs more about the show – but this post is already massively long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and hope that this is enough to get you to take a look at the series, no matter what your views on cheerleaders or American sport!

Have a great Sunday everyone.

*and for long-time viewers of MTT who (like me) have never made it to a Cowboys game, this does have a pretty much complete performance of Thunderstruck for you to enjoy and see how it all the various parts fit together. And yes, Kelli does also explain her Yes, No, Maybe scoring system for auditions. You’re welcome.

books

Rationalisation ahoy!

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We are a couple of weeks out from Book Con and that means that I need to start thinking about what I might take to sell this year. Although it’s a conference about fiction for girls, it doesn’t just have to be books that fit that genre – last time I got some British Library Crime Classics in the sale for example. And we all know I’m always running out of shelf space so I’ve got my name down to sell a few and now I just need to figure out what, how much I’m going to charge and how people are going to pay me. Wish me luck.

mystery, Series I love

Series I Love: The Three Dahlia Mysteries

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The third book in the Three Dahlia mysteries came out this week, and there is a fourth coming in November, so it seems like a good time to talk about Katy Watson’s mystery series.

So as I wrote in my Book of the Week Post about the first book, The Three Dahlias, the Dahlias of the title are three actresses who have all played the same character – Dahlia Lively, the heroine of a series of 1930s murder mysteries. Rosalind was the first to play her in the original movies, Caro played her in a long running TV adaptation and now Posy is taking the lead in a new movie. In the first book the women are all at a convention at the home of the author who wrote the series when a murder happens. In the second book, A Very Lively Murder, the murder happens on the set of the new movie. And now, in the third, Seven Lively Suspects, the trio are at a crime festival where Caro is due to speak about her new book about their first investigation. But before they arrive a podcast team asks them to be part of their new series about a murder five years ago where they are convinced that the wrong man was convicted.

I really like this series. I was sceptical about how Katy Watson was going to find more ways for the Dalhias to get tangled up in murders, but this third instalment is actually pretty ingenious and makes sense without it feeling like they’re bringing murder wherever they go (a la Jessica Fletcher!). We have a fourth coming in November – A Lively Midwinter Wedding – which is teed up at the end of Seven Lively Suspects.

These are hardback first releases – so the first two are in paperback now, and the latest is a hardback. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too. I bought the first two (in hardback!) but I got the latest via NetGalley, which may mean at some point I end up buying the third in hardback as well because I do like a matching set…

Have a great weekend everyone.

Book previews

Out Today: The Cracked Mirror

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This is billed as a cross genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly – with an elderly village lady sleuth and a doesn’t play by the rules LA homicide detective whose worlds collide. I haven’t read any Chris Brookmyre before but I was lucky enough to get an advance of this – and I have got it underway so I’ll report back on whether or not it’s too hard boiled for me!